Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Land," Gendering War Talk, eds. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: PUP,
1993): 205-226).
16 See also Mary Jacobus, "The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the
Floss" Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982)
37-52; Mary Russo, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," Feminist Studies/ Critical
Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1986) 213-29; Tanya
Modleski, "Feminism and the Power of Interpretation: Some Critical Readings," in
Feminist Studies / Critical Studies, 121-38.
17 Somewhat ironically, McClung's narrator observes that men do recognize women's contributions,
but only when it suits their purpose. For example, a recruiter tries to convince
a reluctant conscript that he must not let his wife stand in the way of his
enlistment. She will be well taken care of on the homefront, the recruiter insists (hypocritically,
since he denies his own wife an "active" role), because "women are the best soldiers
of all" (186).
19 Coral Ann Howells, in Private and Fictional Worlds: Canadian Women Novelists of the
1970s and 1980s (London: Methuen, 1987), does not go far enough in her claim that, in
their stories about the lives of girls and women between the 1970s and the 1980s,
Canadian women writers were redefining heroism (Introduction 5). Obviously,
Canadian women were reinterpreting the term as early as the Great War.
20 Descriptions like Beynon's of the atrocities a soldier would witness on the battlefield
should counter the commonly held belief that women know nothing about war. I am
reminded of a quotation which appears in Sarah Ruddick's Maternal Thinking, attributed
to suffragist Anna Shaw: "Looking into the face of... one dead man we see two
dead, the man and the life of the woman who gave him birth; the life she wrought into
his life! And looking into his dead face someone asks a woman, what does a woman
know about war? What, friends, in the face of a crime like that does a man know about
war?" (151).
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